Don't like this generalization? Here, try another one!

Over Celestial Junk there's much head scratching. It seems Mr. Junk's step-son submitted a paper on Islamic terrorism and the outcome was not quite what was hoped:

"The essay came back with a lower mark that his other submissions, despite the fact that it was likely my step-son’s most thoughtful and best structured so far. The professor made a number of structural suggestions; but in conclusion, he stated that one cannot blame terrorism on a religion … period."

Okay, first off, it's curious that he thinks this is his step-son's "best structured" essay and yet part of the low mark was a result of the professor needing to make "structural suggestions." Of course all parents are delusional when speaking of their children, mine think I'm good looking! But of course the essay structure is not the real problem, the real problem is that this academic is proving resistant to gross over-generalizations:

"So, look what we have. We have a university political science professor who is unwilling … ever … to consider the effect of religion on any given population. He will blame every conceivable thing on Jihad, except religion."

I think Mr. Junk got the last bit backwards, but okay, I get his point. But if you're talking about the effect of a religion, it's difficult to explain why millions of Muslims seem to be able to lead peaceful, productive lives without blowing shit up. But this isn't just a problem with one misguided prof, this is a problem with all "liberals" and "progressives." To Mr. Junk they are all self-hating anti-Westerners who inexplicably hang around in that most Western of institutions, the academy.

The roots of terrorism are complicated, and this frustration on the part of Mr. Junk over the inability of more reflective people to jump on the Islamofascism bandwagon reminds me of H.L. Mencken's words:

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."

9/11/07

There's a great deal that can strike one about this day. That bin Laden is still taunting the West through his video releases is perhaps the most significant detail. So many people were convinced that he'd have been captured or killed by the end of 2001. Now instead he's metastasized as sort of extremist folk hero to those that buy into his world view. He can't accomplish much directly, but he's now a symbol, an idea. He cannot set up a large-scale terror-training regime, but he doesn't have to.

Guantanamo: Eternal Prisoners

Whenever some new, invasive measure is introduced in the name of public safety or national security invariably, someone will say something about how the innocent have nothing to fear. So it was Gitmo - this would be a place where those thought to be Very Bad Men (are there any women in Gitmo?) would be sent to face a kangaroo court justice. Of course if you were innocent, you'd be cleared and sent on your way. No harm, no foul.

Right?

Wrong.

In a CBC News item today it comes out that several Uighur detainees have been turned down for asylum by the Canadian government. I find it significant that they are Uighurs as the current Conservative government seems to have a soft spot for anyone running afoul of the Chinese government (not a bad thing, mind you) - as the Uighurs often do.

In another case, Mr. Ahmed Belbacha is being forced to return to Algeria after having been cleared of any wrongdoing at Gitmo. Algeria has its own problems with Islamic militant groups and therefore may arrest and torture Belbacha anyway. The mere fact that he was picked up an sent to Gitmo seems to be the only evidence they need.

How many people are going to face this kind of fate? How many were just truck drivers or tourists or whatever who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is not a crime to travel to Pakistan or anywhere else that gets labeled as a terrorist hot spot. And yet it appears that once you are put in Gitmo, you are, in the minds of too many, forever a terrorist.

"Terrorist" means whatever they say it means

In labeling a branch of the Iranian military as a "specially designated global terrorist organization," the Bush administration seems to have decided to stretch the word "terrorist" to the point of meaninglessness. George Orwell said in the 1940s:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable."

Surely the same could be said for the word "terrorism" today. In this instance it seems to signal those that do not-nice things in other countries. If the Revolutionary Guard gets this definition, then surely it applies to the CIA, Mossad and host of other government and military agencies. Why not stop there, see if you can incorporate the words "terrorist" and "terrorism" into your day-to-day vocabulary. Here are some examples:

• That idiot on his cellphone cut me off! What a terrorist!
• Someone's dog shat on my lawn, this is an act of terrorism!
• Out of pineapple yogurt? This grocery store is a terrorist cell!
• Those guys down the street are playing loud music outdoors again, it's an act of terrorism!

So you see, the possibilities are endless! I'll leave with this, a video for the song Gift Shop, it has the line "and if it's a lie, terrorists made me say it" which seems to capture the amazing vagueness of the word terrorism and the way that vagueness makes for perfect scapegoats and bogeymen every time.

The Free Market is Magic!

Apparently that was the thinking going into Iraq on the part of those in the US that were tasked with planning its post-invasion economy:

"Brinkley said early economic planners had made the understandable mistake of assuming that a free market would rapidly emerge to replace what he described as Saddam's "kleptocracy", and create full employment."

One can only imagine that these same people think they can put a watch in a bag, smash it with a hammer, and pull a much better watch out of the bag. This is more of the Underpants Gnomes-type thinking that has characterized this invasion:
Step 1: Invade country, overthrow old order.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Stable, united, prosperous, market-economy, pro-US, pro-Israel, cheap oil-selling Iraq.
For all of their pro-market posturing, I'm wondering if the Bushies have any understanding of how markets are supposed to work.

Guess who's back!

I guess this may be getting lost in the midst of the war on terror, but, uh, the terrorists of al Qaeda are doing better organization-wise than they have since 2001. The response of the West and NATO in general and the US in particular to terror threats in the first decade of the 21st century may long be studied as the textbook case of what NOT to do.

Surprise! Public Healthcare Does Not Cause Terrorism

There had been some noise from the usual suspects about how the fact that a group of foreign born doctors working for Britain's NHS were behind the latest terror plots somehow indicates the evil of public healthcare. Well, now it appears the very same doctors were attempting to get into the private American system too. They simply had yet to write an aptitude test. There would appear to be lots of "bureaucracy" in which one can "hide" in the American medical system.

Glasgow Airport Attack

It seems to have been relatively harmless though undoubtedly frightening. What's painful is watching CNN desperately try to cycle the same bits of info and yet make them sound fresh each time. (A truck crash! Men arrested! We have video of a fire!) BBC World had not, at last viewing, broken into its programming on the tenth anniversary of the Hong Kong handover.

London

It is of course a city so much more than palaces and museums:

...and again:

...of course so was Baghdad, and of course one wrong never justifies another. Let's just be thankful today didn't turn out the way someone wanted it.

London Bomb Plot Foiled

In another case that surprisingly did not require any Jack Bauer-style torture, alert citizens and a responsive police force seem to have stopped a terror attack in central London.

"The peace candidate always wins"

This is an interesting bit of commentary from Ron Paul. There is lots that I would undoubtedly disagree with if I sat down and studied Ron Paul's politics, but the man has talked more sense than anyone else on Iraq and terror in the '08 campaign. That's why he has this buzz now.

Homophobia increases terror risk

"I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen."
-Jerry Falwell after 9/11

Falwell later retracted this statement, and its easy to see why. It's an idiotic thing to say, not mention tasteless. One's opinion on gays really has no impact on the likelihood that you will b e victimized by terrorists. Or does it? The interesting thing though is that if anything, homophobia is making this a more dangerous place.

How?

Well indirectly through the firing of gay linguists, something that is still happening in the US. Now the military says that it's just trying to uphold the law. I don't buy it, and moreover, I don't care about that particular law. Many of the gays that have been discharged have insisted that they were trying to be discrete. I don't care if those intercepting terrorist communiques are the gayest gays ever. It doesn't matter. Being able to speak the language of the enemy is simply too valuable a skill.

Don't believe me? Remember that here in Canada the Air India bombing could have been prevented if Canada's spy agencies had anyone who could speak Punjabi to translate the intercepts that had already been recorded.

Homeland Insecurity or The Right Profile?

...with apologies to The Clash for that title.

The story of some kind of plot to assault Fort Dix is all over the news tonight. What is interesting to me is that the guys accused of doing this are Albanian Kosovars.

So?

Well, Kosovars, despite being Muslim have a stubbornly European appearance. Seeing these guys on the street, I suspect a lot of people might have thought them Russians or something. Those that call for swarthy looking middle-easterners to be singled out for attention would have missed these guys. Sure they have beards in the court drawings, but to those who would profile bearded men I should hastened to point out that Gillette (among others) have an entire product line devoted to thwarting this reasoning.

Profiling, aside from being racist, doesn't work because, among other things, the terrorists can figure it out. Think that all suicide bombers are men? They start recruiting women. Think that they all have funny-sounding names? They get a guy like Richard Reid. Think they are all from the Middle East? They get some Kosovars.

This case was solved apparently because a video store clerk was asked to copy a jihadist video. He didn't like what he saw and he called the cops. In other words it was NOT solved because the Patriot Act lets the FBI check up on your reading list at the local library. It was NOT solved because we put all the Arabs in concentration camps.
Picture: None of Kafka's ideas were used in the solving of this crime.

Twitchy Cops In Boston

It's not just the Mooninites that are doing this either. Ron's got a story about some other dude, his crime was standing around wearing a backpack - in Boston.

John Manley Is Wrong About Anti-Terrorism Laws

Apparently Manley's comments on Macleans' new site have caused a stir. I think Manley is dead wrong, here are a couple particulars that stand out to me:

"I believe that Cabinet and Parliament got the balance right in 2001-02. And I do not believe that anything has changed to make that balance inappropriate today."

In 2001-02? At that time we were still in collective post-9/11 freakout mode (and understandably so). We thought (at least I did) that we'd be averaging one or two terror attacks in North America on a 9/11 scale every year. We have now the advantage of distance to understand that maybe some laws were draconian.

"I believe there are adequate checks on the use of these powers, such as mandatory judicial review, to ensure that they are not abused."

Apparently Manley hasn't been following Harper's plans for the courts.

"And the most important civil liberty is freedom from fear of harm on the part of the civilian population, without which our other liberties mean very little."

Yeah, just ask Maher Arar about how fearsome Syrian prison is. Arbitrary arrest and/or rendition is something to be afraid of too. I can't help but get the sense that when someone with the kind of privilege that Manley has as a former cabinet minister says stuff like this, his assumption is something like "Oh well, arrest and rendition could never happen to me, John Manley, or my buddies in government and industry." He cannot conceive how these laws might be frightening to those less politically connected.